I saw this post by a “Bob Clark” on Facebook today. I don’t know him. But his point struck me.
He is completely wrong on his facts. But he writes them as if they were facts. The stock market went from 7,949 to 19,827 under Obama, and now to 21,206 under Trump in his first five months. Averaging this out over eight Obama years, this is not a rally, it’s just the continuation of Obama’s slope. How Trump can take any credit for this is beyond me. How Trump supporters bolster their arguments is dumbfounding.
June 2, 2017: 21,206 – Today under Trump
January 20, 2017: 19,827 – day Obama left office
January 20, 2009: 7,949 – day Obama took office
The DOW more than doubled under Obama. When Obama took office, it was in freefall. We were worried about total economic collapse. Remember?
Now Bob Clark is acting like Obama left an economy like Bush did. Seriously?
Here is the graph:
This looks to me like the slope of the graph has simply continued the way it was going under Obama.
The current rally in the stock market is mostly due to tech stocks, like Amazon and Apple. I am not seeing any rise in oil or coal, but granted, defense contractors, like Lockheed and Boeing are going to see bumps from the Saudi arms sales.
So I don’t know what Bob Clark’s ticker looks like between 2008 and 2017, but here is mine.
And calling Trump a racecar?
Really?
I am so sick of these Trumpeters lying, or, at best, not facing fucking facts!!
I met a supporter on Friday: his defense of Trump? — “I don’t listen to what he says, ’cause I know what he is thinking and God has a special place for him to do good for the poor — God will forgive Trump for all the wrong he has done and this is what Trump wants, to help the poor.” JHChrist — they are insane!
Yes. That is insane.
Speaking of lying, the graph posted on this blog has a distorted y-axis.
The points are three times further apart at the bottom than the top, making gains when Obama took office look much larger and gains when Trump took office smaller.
Wow, that is true, and I must admit, I never noticed it. Thanks for pointing that out. Fortunately, Trump is off this chart, so not too much damage. Why would somebody create a graph like that? — and of course, I copied it.
I did a better job in this one, with the second chart: https://norberthaupt.com/2018/01/28/the-dow-under-obama-and-trump-one-year-later/
In reply to Norbert Haupt:
Someone posted the graph to Twitter yesterday, which caused me to do a search, finding your blog post and an earlier version of the graph (without the red writing) posted to a forum:
http://www.shaggytexas.com/board/showthread.php/176213-Donald-Trump-2017?p=11446020&viewfull=1#post11446020
After a further search, I’ve found that the graph was created using a logarithmic scale, which is apparently preferred by investors.
It may be a screenshot from this site but with the ‘Log Scale’ checkbox set:
http://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-average-last-10-years
I try to show sources when I can find them. Like here, for instance: https://norberthaupt.com/2015/09/22/last-22-years-dow-with-democrats-vs-republicans/. But on that one, I could not, so I am not sure where I found it. It was not under that twitter link you showed – it wouldn’t have looked legitimate enough for me to pass on. Anyway, I learned about the logarithmic scale and that makes sense. My vote is that nobody tried to make it look more impressive for Obama than for Trump. If you pulled the same for Bush and Obama, you’d have similar results. However, I can tell you that after this exchange with you here I will be more careful about my choices and sources in the future. Don’t need to open myself up to a sloppy presentation.
Let’s take a look:
Day after Obama elected the market closed at 9139. 13 months later, on January 20th, the market closed at 10,603. 16%
Day after Trump elected , market closed at 18,332. 13 months later, the market has closed at 26,017. 42%
Pretty much sums it up.
Taking arbitrary snapshots does not tell a real story. We need to look at the longer trend. Also, Obama started when the economy was in freefall, Trump started after it had been robustly growing for 7 years. The current rally seems unreal to me, and I am not sure we’re not looking at a bubble.Time will tell.
Taking arbitrary snapshots… which is exactly what you did. But you chose the day Obama took office… as if the markets were unaware that he was elected two months before. Point being, the markets responded negatively in the months leading up to Obamas election and his inauguration.. then, after racking of major deficits and printing money to keep rates down, lowering the valuation of the dollar, it still took five years to get back to 2007 market values. Robust? Really?
Your comment makes no sense. Obama was elected when the market was in a precipitous drop – we called it freefall at the time. It was a terrible time for the economy, and Obama had nothing to do with it. He literally inherited a mess. So I would not call the months between September 2007 and December 2007 anything like normal. Would you have expected that on election day, a sick, bottomless market all of a sudden would have recovered itself? My house, at the time, dropped from $450k to $180k in a couple of month – before Obama was elected and in the couple of months after that.
Your comments prompted me that it’s time I sat down and did another analysis. I’ll let you know what I can post (in a few days).
I took another look: https://norberthaupt.com/2018/01/28/the-dow-under-obama-and-trump-one-year-later/